Word of God

The Bible is called the writ­ten Word of God. This does not mean that the Bible fell from heav­en ready made. Nei­ther does this mean that God dic­tat­ed the Bible word for word to men who were mere­ly His pas­sive instru­ments. It means that God has revealed Him­self as the true and liv­ing God to His Peo­ple, and that as one aspect of His divine self-rev­e­la­tion God inspired His Peo­ple to pro­duce scrip­tures, i.e., writ­ings which con­sti­tute the true and gen­uine expres­sions of His Truth and His Will for His Peo­ple and for the whole world.

The words of the Bible are human words, for indeed, all words are human. They are human words, how­ev­er, which God Him­self inspired to be writ­ten in order to remain as the scrip­tur­al wit­ness to Him­self. As human words, the words of the Bible con­tain all of the marks of the men who wrote them, and of the time and the cul­ture in which they were writ­ten. Nev­er­the­less, in the full integri­ty of their human con­di­tion and form, the words of the Bible are tru­ly the very Word of God.

The Bible is tru­ly the Word of God in human form because its ori­gin is not in man but in God, Who willed and inspired its cre­ation. In this sense, the Bible is not like any oth­er book. In the Bible, in and through the words of men, one finds the self-rev­e­la­tion of God and can come to a true and gen­uine knowl­edge of Him and His will and pur­pose for man and the world. In and through the Bible, human per­sons can enter into com­mu­nion with God.

All scrip­ture is inspired by God and is prof­itable for teach­ing, for reproof, for cor­rec­tion, and for train­ing in right­eous­ness, that the man of God may be com­plete, equipped for every good work (2 Tim 3:16–17).

It is the faith of the Ortho­dox Church that the Bible, as the divine­ly-inspired Word of God in the words of men, con­tains no for­mal errors or inner con­tra­dic­tions con­cern­ing the rela­tion­ship between God and the world. There may be inci­den­tal inac­cu­ra­cies of a non-essen­tial char­ac­ter in the Bible. But the eter­nal spir­i­tu­al and doc­tri­nal mes­sage of God, pre­sent­ed in the Bible in many dif­fer­ent ways, remains per­fect­ly con­sis­tent, authen­tic, and true.